Broncos wide receiver Haven Moses (25) celebrates with teammate Tom Glassic after scoring on a 20-yard pass from Craig Morton in a 21-7 regular season win over the Pittsburgh Steelers on Nov. 6, 1977. The Broncos also beat the Steelers 34-21 in the divisional playoff round.(Denver Post file)

Editor’s Note: Terry Frei wrote about the Denver Broncos’ first Super Bowl at the end of the 1977 season in his 2007 book, ’77: Denver, the Broncos, and A Coming of Age. The book places the Broncos’ season — and even the two-week Super Bowl buildup — in the context of the transformative social and political events, plus other sports, in Colorado. The following excerpt is part of Chapter 11, titled “Mardi Gras.” It has been considerably condensed to focus on football and is slightly edited with clarifying background and identification that appeared earlier in the book. The Broncos had made the Super Bowl with a famous 20-17 victory over the Oakland Raiders at Mile High Stadium in the AFC championship game on January 1, 1978, a win highlighted by Craig Morton’s two touchdown passes to Haven Moses.

Super Bowl XII
After they rode in a sendoff parade through downtown the previous Friday, the Broncos traveled to New Orleans on Monday, January 9, and when they checked into their hotel near the airport, the Sheraton in Kenner, they found they had more roommates than usual.

Coach Red Miller and a few players, including Craig Morton, went to the Superdome to talk with reporters, and the Post was agog that “several dozen” surrounded and grilled the Broncos quarterback. Morton went on the offensive, attempting to head off talk about him playing a “grudge” game against his former team. “Tom Landry taught me everything I know about professional football,” he told the reporters. “He’s a great coach, but time moves along, and it was time I left Dallas.” As reporters rotated, Morton was asked several times to compare Landry and Miller. “Let’s see,” he told the writers. “Write this down so we’ll have it and we can pass it out. Everybody’s going to ask.”

A writer pointed out that it was “only Monday.”

Morton’s response: “I won’t be very good by Wednesday.”

When the Broncos tried to shower at the hotel before going to Tulane Stadium for Picture Day on Tuesday morning, they didn’t have any hot water.

The Broncos also practiced at Tulane, and only one player thought that was great — former Green Wave star quarterback Steve Foley, the Broncos’ starting cornerback.

The whole experience was becoming a nightmare for Morton.

“We had horrible practice conditions,” Morton recalls. “It wasn’t like a Super Bowl. It was just the worst! The worst! They were taking down the Sugar Bowl and it was muddy and terrible, and it was the worst. We had to dress at the hotel and go back and forth and it was like a high school game. It was not a Super Bowl. They had cockroaches at the hotel and everybody was screaming, and wives came in, in the middle of the night, it was horrible.”

Back in Denver the previous week, Morton had addressed an IRS lien filed against him, saying everything was being cleared up. At Picture Day, he told scribes he would address that just once, too, again spelling out that it was being taken care of. (As it turned out, the Broncos had advanced him $125,000, and that was far from unprecedented in the NFL.)

Foley tried to make up for the disgruntlement about New Orleans by having a huge group of his teammates, including his fellow defensive backs, over to his parents’ home for dinner. They were astounded to see the locks on the refrigerator and freezer. Steve was in the middle of Ivan and Jane Foley’s 13 children, and the family lived in a converted former convent next to Saint Rita of Cascia Catholic Church. Exaggerating, cornerback Louis Wright says, “Steve had twenty brothers and sisters, so this was like a normal dinner for his family.”

“He said that every time a plane took off, the hotel shook. I told him we were on the other side and that every time one landed, our hotel shook.”

And wait, there was more …

“The food was so bad, about midweek we sent back to Denver and brought Daddy Bruce down,” Dolbin recalls. “Daddy Bruce cooked for us the rest of the time we were there.”

“Daddy Bruce” Randolph was Denver’s barbeque king.

Miller went out to dinner with his wife, Nancy, plus son Steve and daughter Lana, in the French Quarter on Thursday night. To the reporters, he said listening to the jazz reminded him of his days at Western Illinois, when he would play the piano, Lou Saban played the bass and Joe Collier — in 1978, the Broncos’ defensive coordinator — hummed along.

At another restaurant, the Broncos’ linebackers — including starters Randy Gradishar, Tom Jackson, Bob Swenson and Joe Rizzo — dined, and the owner went on the street to brag about it and entice other customers to come in, ask for autographs and spend money. He gave the players T-shirts with his restaurant name on them, and when the bill came, the tab was about $150 and nearly half of it came because he had charged them $9.50 for each of the T-shirts.

They threw them at him.

By then, Swenson had a bad feeling.

“To me, New Orleans was one of the worst experiences I’ve ever had,” Swenson recalls. “I’m a dreamer, right? So you have this dream that the Super Bowl is this all-time, all-time sporting event in the world, and in a way it is the pinnacle of everything. Rings and world champs and all that kind of stuff, and here you are, a Cinderella story. … So we get to New Orleans and I don’t even invite my parents. Maybe it’s foresight. “You would think you’d bring your parents to see this. I’m from a small town and Tracy High, where football is like the biggest thing and now one of their high school kids is in the Super Bowl. They had Bronco day and all this stuff and it’s Raider country. All of that is going on. “So we go to the Super Bowl and I was shocked. Wait a second, we don’t get invited to the party? The Super Bowl party, the media party? We’re not invited? And there are cockroaches in the hotel. I remember that. I remember the elevator getting stuck and the practice facilities. I remember I was like, This is it? It was kind of like a spiritual defining moment for me.”

All around [Colorado], many young fans — and some older ones — were throwing down Orange Crush as if it was water, hoping it would help the Broncos. It replaced Coke or Pepsi as the soft drink of choice. Teenage girls, some of whom still would be able to say 30 years later that Steve Foley’s birthday was November 11 as they tried to remember where they put their car keys, replaced their Bobby Sherman or Shaun Cassidy posters with Bronco team pictures.

Back in North Denver, the kids at Holy Family School were immersed in Broncomania.

“We were required to wear orange,” recalls Vic Lombardi, who was 8 years old at the time and 30 years later is the sports anchor at KCNC/ Channel 4. “I’ll never forget that. We had a dress code at school. We had to wear specific clothes, but during that year, there were days we had to wear orange. So my mom went out and bought me this Orange Crush shirt, and I wore that thing all week long the week before the Super Bowl.”

Actually, the Broncos of that season were part of the Lombardi family’s Americanization. His parents, Ezio and Bambina, came from Italy to Denver in 1966.

“I was in second grade that season, and I still was struggling to speak English,” Vic says. “We didn’t speak English at home. We spoke all Italian. I remember going to Holy Family and my sister Rita had to teach me how to speak English. I remember specifically all the ceremonial stuff we did at school. The school took on the Broncos as part of the school day. We did the Pledge of Allegiance and then we did the Pledge to the Broncos. And the drink-Orange Crush-was part of our family. I took full advantage of that. And it came not only in the cans, but those little glass bottles. My parents were trying to assimilate to the culture as much as they could. It was almost expected that we were Bronco fans. Everyone else was a Bronco fan, so under our roof, we better be Bronco fans.”

By then, Lombardi says, “the M&M Connection was everything to me.”

The Cowboys had opened as 5-point favorites, and that’s where the line stayed most places.

The Super Bowl kickoff on Sunday, January 15, was scheduled for 5 p.m. in New Orleans, and guard Tom Glassic — despite having lost considerable weight because of allergies and fatigue — was pumped all day. He says he was down to about 230, but some teammates remember him weighing in at 223 that week. His roster weight was 254.

“My family’s all at the same hotel,” he recalls. “There were three buses going to the stadium as usual. Fifteen minutes before we have to leave, I went to my parents’ room to say goodbye and they wished me luck. You know when the adrenaline’s pumping? My adrenaline’s pumping, and I can’t use it. So I laid down on the bed, for just a minute, and I must have dozed off because next thing I know, my father’s standing at my window.”

John Glassic was excited, pointing and saying, “Tommy, isn’t that the last bus leaving?”

“Dad, don’t (fool) around with me now,” Tom said. “I’m too nervous.”

“No, really, Tommy … ”

Tom jumped out of bed.

The last bus had left.

Glassic spotted a policeman in the parking lot, one who obviously had been there to watch over the buses before they left.

“Excuse me, officer,” Tom said, “think you can give me a ride to the game?”

When the officer gave him a look, Tom added: “I’m playing today.”

The officer consented, and Glassic calls him “a good guy. But he didn’t put his siren on, his lights on. It’s game-day traffic to the Superdome, bumper to bumper, and game time is coming up and I’m sitting in the car. I see the Superdome way in the distance and I’m looking at my watch! We finally get there, and the guy dropped me off and left. So I’m standing outside the Superdome on Super Bowl Sunday, and how the hell do I get in here?

“I walked up to the gate and said, ‘I’m playing today,’ and the guy says, ‘Playing what, the tuba? Get out of here!’ So I was walking around, trying to find the place where the players come in. When I got there, I said who I was and pleaded with the security guard. I said, ‘Talk to somebody, go send somebody to the locker room. I know they’re looking for me … at least I hope so.’ So he said, ‘Hey, aren’t you the guy playing Randy White today? You sure you want to go in there?’

“Now,” Glassic adds, shaking his head, “everybody’s a comedian. I was just about to push the guy aside and go running down the hall and yelling, ‘I’m here!’ They were going to grab me and put me in a strait jacket. I pleaded with this guy to go send somebody to the locker room and ask.

“Finally, an assistant trainer came out and vouched for him, adding: “We were wondering if he was going to show up.”

As the Broncos were in the tunnel and about to take the field for kickoff, safety Billy Thompson looked over at linebacker Tom Jackson. Jackson was crying. Thompson understood.

“We both looked out and it was a sea of orange,” Thompson recalls. “I said, ‘Hey, man, we’re here. We’re gonna get this one.'”

They didn’t.

Morton threw four interceptions among the eight Denver turnovers, and the Broncos didn’t do a good job of protecting him. Although the defense hung in, it wore down and was on the field too long. Dallas had a short field all day, thanks to the turnovers. Plus, Randy Gradishar reinjured his ankle, was hobbled, and in the fourth quarter finally had to admit he couldn’t go any longer.

Jim Turner drilled a 47-yard field goal in the third quarter to close it to 13-3, but the Cowboys came back with Roger Staubach’s 45-yard touchdown pass to Butch Johnson, who made a terrific diving catch in the end zone that would make every “Super Bowl over the years” highlight segment for years to come.

The Broncos got back within 10 after Rick Upchurch’s 67-yard punt return — a Super Bowl record at the time — set his team up at the Dallas 10. Miller sent Norris Weese on for Morton — recognizing both that it wasn’t Morton’s day and that mobility would give a Broncos quarterback a shot against the withering rush — and Lytle scored from 1 yard out. But then Dallas fullback Robert Newhouse’s pass went for a 29-yard touchdown to Golden Richards. That was it. Game, set, match.

The miracle wouldn’t happen, and it didn’t have the feel of a fluke at all.

Otis Armstrong says, “I think we were too star-struck to play. We were in over our heads. The Cowboys had been there before and had done that. They knew what to do.”

The Broncos ended up with only 156 yards of total offense. Morton was a miserable 4 for 14, for 39 yards, with the four interceptions. Armstrong had only 7 carries, for 27 yards, and Rob Lytle was the leading ground gainer, with 35 yards on 10 rushes.

Glassic struggled with Randy White, but to attribute the pass rush only to him is unfair. Teammate after teammate goes out of his way to give him credit, marveling that he even was on the field at all, given his illness and weight loss.

“I’m proud of him staying in there for every down and doing the best he could,” Red Miller says.

Glassic concedes, “I could have done better,” and he says the Broncos had formulated a much better offensive line game plan to combat the flex defense by the time they next played the Cowboys.

When Denver got behind and stayed behind, the Cowboys could tee off, and it all was a formula for disaster.

Miller remembers it as a “tough matchup” up front. “It’s hard for a team to overcome one area like that,” he says. But he also means that as a sort of compliment — that his patched-together offensive line, with two starters who weren’t even with the team at the start of training camp and a third that was getting fined for being underweight, finally hit a wall against the Cowboys.

So did Morton, for whatever reason. A bad day? Pressures of several kinds? The cumulative effect of his unquestioned physical problems — the ones he had been so courageous to combat as he kept keep playing? The Cowboys? It almost certainly was a combination of all of the above and a whirlwind of factors. Inevitably, his performance, coupled with his well-publicized financial issues at the time and gamblers’ focus on the Super Bowl, gave rise to ridiculous rumors that he had thrown the game. No credible evidence to back that up has ever surfaced, and the team had advanced him the $125,000.

“We couldn’t do anything right,” Morton recalls. “There was no reason to think we’d play that bad. We just gave the ball away too many times. They played well and they knew we couldn’t run against them. They pulled the safeties up and blitzed all the time, and we didn’t protect enough. I did call audibles and that was a mistake. The depressing thing is when you look back on the game, I don’t know what you do. What you do is run the ball, and we couldn’t do that. When we got in passing situations, they just came after us, and they beat me to death.”

He pauses.

“I’ve never watched that game,” he says.

In this Jan. 15, 1978 file photo, Denver Broncos quarterback Craig Morton (7) rests briefly on his knees after being sacked by Dallas Cowboys defensive end Ed Jones (72) following the play during NFL football’s Super Bowl XII in New Orleans. The Cowboys defeated the Broncos 27-10. (Associated Press file)

The game took a dark turn of a different sort in the third quarter, when the defensive coaches were told that there had been a telephoned death threat made against nose tackle Rubin Carter. They didn’t tell Carter and he stayed in the game.

Carter says he was informed later that the call came early in the game, after he hit Roger Staubach a couple of times. He muses that it probably was a nervous gambler who had a lot of money riding on the Cowboys.

He says that defensive line coach Stan Jones “was walking back and forth with me on the sideline because I was always a walker.” Carter laughs and adds, “I probably wore him out.”

It was a 27-10 loss on the international stage. But as the clock wound down with the Denver defense on the field, Tom Jackson again turned to Billy Thompson as the orange-clad fans gave the Broncos a standing ovation and chanted: “WE LOVE THE BRONCOS.”

“I don’t know if we won or lost,” Jackson said, dumbfounded.

Thompson understood. Again. Years later, he still has a tone of wonderment in his voice as he tells that story.

Defensive end Barney Chavous says the Broncos “didn’t play the kind of football that got us there. I don’t know if we were overwhelmed, but whatever the reason, we didn’t click on all cylinders. I definitely think we could have beaten the Cowboys, but we had to play like we did against the Raiders, like we played against Baltimore, like we played against Houston.”

Chavous says he has talked with other players since who agree with him when he tosses out the possibility that the parade-or motorcade-sendoff might not have been a good idea. “Maybe we should have kept that thing in perspective,” he says. “We hadn’t won the championship yet.”

When the game ended, NFL security personnel told Carter he had to get off the field. Now.

Carter protested that he knew some of the Cowboys from all-star games and, anyway, he thought it was only right to shake his opponents’ hands.

The NFL men said no. They told him what was going on when he got to the locker room.

In the game, Carter had six tackles, two assists, two sacks, and a fumble recovery.

After the rest of the team filed back in, Billy Thompson — who had been having shoulder pains the entire game and didn’t ever feel comfortable-finally figured out what the problem was.

He had been wearing Steve Foley’s shoulder pads-and vice versa.

John Ralston, the former Broncos coach who was instrumental in assembling the roster, was in the Superdome that day. “I was so pleased with what they had done,” he says. “I went down to New Orleans by myself and watched the game. Nobody [in the media] was around, though I saw a lot of Denver people and they saw me. Gee, I would have liked to see them win, but to see them in the game was something.”

The Broncos came back home to a changed Denver.

“When we landed here,” tackle Claudie Minor says, “they had an area on the concourse over by the electric cars, roped off, and there were a lot of fans there. I don’t know how many thousands of fans. We were just blown away. They cured our wounds, mended us emotionally.”

It hurt Miller to lose, but he soon could allow himself to think about the overall picture and the difference from when he was with the Broncos as an assistant.

“What was great for me was I had coached games in Denver when there were 9,000 people there, maybe, and a lot of those were Boy Scouts with free tickets,” he says. “I’ve been there with the Quonset huts, where I bumped my head every time I got up to go to the bathroom or something. I’d been there when the offense would meet in a room that was meant for maybe 10 to 15 guys, max. Some guys would have to stand up to watch film, it was that crowded. I’ve been here when we didn’t have proper dressing facilities and proper training facilities, and we didn’t have weights. I thought the people so much yearned for this, that somebody had to be the first, and that was a thrill for me.”

The market was in transformation, and it never could be the same.

“Denver should have gotten the Nobel Peace Prize that year,” Haven Moses says. “There was more done that year to bring people together than I’ve ever seen in my life. It transformed the attitudes of this city. This is a beautiful town and a beautiful place and things were starting to happen here. There was something needed to kick it off. And this brought attention to what Denver was about to become.”

Mike Klis has been with The Denver Post since 1998, after working 13 years with the Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph. Major League Baseball was Klis' initial passion. He started covering the Colorado Rockies after Coors Field was approved for construction in August 1990.

Nicki Jhabvala is the Sports Digital News Editor for The Denver Post. Before arriving in Denver, she spent five years at Sports Illustrated working primarily as its online NBA editor, and she was most recently the overnight home page editor at the New York Times. She has reported regularly on the Broncos since joining the staff.

A published author and award-winning journalist, Benjamin Hochman is a sports columnist for The Denver Post. He previously worked on the staff of the New Orleans Times-Picayune, winners of two Pulitzer Prizes for their Hurricane Katrina coverage.